“Dear Goddess: My work is thriving. But I’m finding that my work personality and my home personality are really different. I hate feeling like two people.”
A. But, my darling earth child, you ARE two different people.
A career is so much about control–of yourself and, if you have a staff, of others–and about repression of feelings. It’s about downplaying sexiness, neediness, vulnerability. What could be more radically antithetical to being expressive, loving, emotionally present, sexually responsive–the things you want to be with your lover or partner?
Unless you’re a talented actress and can move seamlessly into different roles and different experiences quickly, you have no choice but to bring this contained, efficient self back home after work. To be able to come home, open up, let go, feel exposed, touch, cry, laugh, tune in to another–well, dearest earth girls, who on earth (or the heavens) can do that?
And more important: No one can do it alone. You can’t be with someone who doesn’t get it. You need a guy who says, You just take your time and unwind. I’m here….I’m unwinding too.
As a friend of mine, Anna, puts it, “Only when Bruce gets how hard it is for both of us are we able to manage to segue into closeness; to kind of line up the physical and emotional.”
I suggest a rule, if you’re living together (this is easy if you’re merely dating): After work, don’t talk to your partner or lover about anything more meaningful than the mail, if that, for at least 45 minutes. Just chill. Honor each other’s moods, exhaustion, preoccupation with everything but each other.
Don’t expect your rhythms to jibe. They won’t; they can’t. Just make sure that, just as you build in space to honor your need to chill, you also build in enough time and space to come together….which, given how much time there is in a day or week, is a matter of actually making dates. And keeping them. Try this–really. It doesn’t guarantee that you’ll both be preoccupation-free, but it guarantees that you are not letting your work personality take total control of your life. And it honors the fact that playing a lot of roles is very hard on love. But not impossible.
